In 2015, leaders of children’s theaters across DC rose to decry The Washington Post’s decision to stop reviewing theater for young audiences. At the time, it felt like an isolated crisis within the larger ecosystem of arts coverage.
Ten years later, a similar conversation is unfolding on a much larger scale in DC’s cultural landscape. In recent layoffs at The Washington Post, over 30 percent of the newsroom was eliminated, according to reporting by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Among the positions affected were staff photographers, editors across the Style and Entertainment desks, and journalists covering the arts.
If the earlier fight was about saving a specific type of coverage, the present moment raises a different question: who will cover the arts at all?
For critics, freelancers, and cultural reporters in the region, the concern is less about the survival of Washington’s theater scene than about the shrinking infrastructure for covering it.
DC Theater Arts spoke to several writers affiliated with The Washington Post about the layoffs, the steady decline in arts coverage, and what the future holds. Some chose to speak anonymously to avoid jeopardizing future work opportunities.
One longtime arts contributor for the Post and The New York Times expressed optimism about the theater community itself. “I’m very hopeful that the loss — what appears to be the loss — of local arts coverage will not negatively impact the theater community in DC, because it’s so strong.” Still, the critic offered blunt advice to aspiring arts writers: “Keep your day job.”
Chris Klimek, who has been a freelance writer with the Post for two decades, echoed similar sentiments about a career in arts journalism. “I think it is now almost inseparable from wanting to pursue a career as a movie star. You just have to be aware of how minute the odds of success are,” he said. “I wouldn’t discourage anyone from going into it, but you have to understand that this is likely something you’ll have to do for love, not money.”
As local theaters grew, WaPo coverage shrank
The decline of arts coverage at the Post did not begin with the most recent layoffs in February 2026. In the DC area, arts organizations and arts coverage have seemed to follow inverse trajectories over the past 20 years.
“Between 2002 and 2012, almost every theater in DC, every major theater, was building or planning to build new facilities,” said Peter Marks, former chief theater critic of The Washington Post, who was with the publication for over 20 years. “There was a complete overhaul of the architecture of the theater in Washington. That made it even more compelling for us to be writing about the development of theater.”
But while the business of theater was on the rise, the profitability of covering it was on a steady decline. “I distinctly remember a meeting with an editor, during which she said to me, ‘Where can we cut? What things should we cut from our review?’ ” Marks recalled in a phone interview. “I remember being shocked. It was the first time I’d heard anything like this.”
That was sometime in 2014. The first to get the axe were TYA (theater for young audience) reviews, followed by community theater coverage. Editors were making cuts based on profitability. “Metrics” or “data science” weren’t yet part of the conversation. That wouldn’t come into play until 2016, when The Washington Post moved to a new building on K Street.
“They put up a big board on the seventh floor in the newsroom,” Marks said. “They had little versions of it on television screens so you could be reminded all day long.” The board tracked metrics such as unique visitors to a story, where readers were coming from (like Facebook or other platforms), and the number of people reading the story at any given moment.
“It was the elephant in the room,” Marks continued. “There was a real obsession at the paper with figuring out what things would make the numbers rise. And it became this kind of, you know, obsessive-compulsive exercise.”
For a publication with 2.5 million subscribers, having a story with metrics in the four digits was not good. “You really had to get up into the five digits,” the former chief theater critic explained. “If you’re looking at the ranking of stories and you were up against the advice columnists who would get hundreds of thousands of hits, you look irrelevant, you look minuscule.”
Layoffs and cuts in the Bezos Era
Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, and changes during the “Bezos Era,” as it was later called, reflected an ideological shift rooted in his long-held belief in “personal liberties and free markets.” Free markets mean that competition, efficiency, and consumer choice decide what succeeds. At the Post, that meant data-driven layoff decisions and unprofitable sections getting cut. At first gradually, and then all at once.
“It changed slowly. It was like that metaphor of the frog in water, and you keep turning up the temperature. It doesn’t know it’s being boiled to death,” Marks said.
Profitability and metrics were only two of many red flags indicating the decline in arts coverage. Newsroom staffing began to thin. As the number of editors decreased, those remaining were stretched across more assignments. “The Washington Post had a very good editing system,” an arts writer shared on background. “But I remember hearing that the editors who were editing theater pieces were overwhelmed and couldn’t edit as much as they once had.”
Trey Graham, a longtime arts editor and critic who has contributed to the Post, The Washington City Paper, USA Today, and NPR, to name a few, noted that the staffers who most strongly supported theater coverage at the paper also began to depart — another early warning sign.
The paper’s second full-time theater critic, Nelson Pressley, left in 2019; the Post did not replace his position. Sarah Kaufman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic, was laid off in 2022; Peter Marks was given a buyout in 2024; and executive features editor Hank Stuever followed in 2025. In the most recent cuts, staff theater critic Naveen Kumar, and editors Zachary Pincus-Roth, and Jonathan Fischer — who played a central role in covering theater and sustaining relationships with freelance critics — were also axed.
“They [Fischer and Pincus-Roth] understood the value of covering what a healthy professional theater scene in an important city is,” Graham said. “I don’t think there’s anyone else there who sees that as a valuable thing right now.”
The final culling: What now?
In the weeks immediately following the February layoffs, arts coverage in the Post slowed to a trickle. But in March, bylines resurfaced for longtime contributors Celia Wren and Chris Klimek, albeit covering dance and museums, not theater. In the two months since the layoffs, six articles on local theater — two “collections” of reviews, and four feature articles — have appeared in the Post, all penned by Post editor and reporter Thomas Floyd. Floyd shared on his Threads account that he was initially laid off but later offered a contract.
According to another freelance critic familiar with the paper, the Post never intended to eliminate local arts coverage. Instead, it has shifted toward relying more heavily on freelancers and, in some cases, publishing combined reviews that cover multiple shows in a single article (i.e., the “collections” of reviews published under Floyd’s byline).
That shift echoes a broader strategy outlined in a March 14 New York Times investigation into Jeff Bezos’s stewardship of the paper. According to the Times, Bezos directed leadership to “reduce the newsroom’s budget by half and double the productivity of those who remained.” For arts coverage, the combined review appears to be one result — fewer standalone pieces, more articles covering multiple productions at once.
For critics who spent decades at the Post, this framework is devastating. Arts coverage has never thrived on free-market logic. It thrived on something else: the belief that a great newspaper has a responsibility to cover its city’s culture, even if that coverage doesn’t make money.
“It can’t all be business and politics,” Graham said. “Humans tell ourselves stories to explain our feelings and our mistakes and our triumphs. We can’t only listen to the facts, because a thousand years from now, what people are going to remember about the business and the politics of today are the stories that people tell about it.”
For longtime critic Celia Wren, who wrote for the Post for over two decades and continues to contribute post-layoffs, the loss extends beyond the theater community itself. A general-interest newspaper like the Post, she explained, reaches readers who might not otherwise encounter arts coverage. “The great thing about a general-interest periodical is that it can expose people who might not be theatergoers necessarily,” she said. “They might happen to see a theater review and glance at it, and that would improve general awareness.”
Graham pointed to a different kind of loss: Newspapers as a historical record. “There is value in having a record that we can look back at to say, ‘Oh, I remember when Cody Nickell was a bit player in production at Theater J,’ ” he said. “The public service mission of a daily newspaper was always one piece of the calculation that cannot really be measured by the metrics the Post has been using.”
For another arts writer, the reduction in coverage negatively impacts serious dialogue about the arts. “An outlet with the Post’s influence and history is a valuable resource to facilitate dialogue and discourse around all sorts of art forms,” the writer said. “If it were to stop covering arts altogether, that gap would be irreplaceable.”
So what’s the way forward?
For journalists navigating this new landscape, Peter Marks offers another strategy: “Color outside the lines of the beat. Find ways to talk about theater that has nothing to do with what is happening within the four walls of a theater space.”
In 2019, while still writing for the Post, Marks took the Bard’s words to heart, showing that all the world indeed is a stage. He started following presidential candidates on the campaign trail and writing about their performance skills. He evaluated how they engaged with audiences and what worked. By applying theater terminology in ways accessible to non-theatergoers, he connected the language of the stage to the broader political climate and public consciousness.“Theater happens all around us, and that’s why we should continue.”
About the Wendi Winters Memorial Series: DC Theater Arts has partnered with the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation to honor the life and work of Wendi Winters, a DC Theater Arts writer who died in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018.
To honor Wendi’s legacy, the Foundation has funded the Wendi Winters Memorial Series — articles produced by DC Theater Arts that make an identifiable contribution to local theater journalism, uplift the local LGBTQIA+ community, or highlight theater companies and practitioners in our region who engage in exemplary work that makes our community a better place.
